


Part 10: Like Stone

by kw20742



Series: Something Like Love [11]
Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Canon Lesbian Relationship, Developing Relationship, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 11:43:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15971621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kw20742/pseuds/kw20742
Summary: Scene embellishment and continuation from 2.7, The Picnic.





	Part 10: Like Stone

Jocelyn’s gaze is affectionate, searching, as she meets Maggie’s eyes. “There was a moment, must have been fifteen years ago...”

Maggie pushes her renegade hair, forever twisting in the wind, off her forehead and behind her ear. She looks at Jocelyn with a wary combination of dawning comprehension and caution. She had wondered this morning if this—whatever ‘this’ turns out to be—might have been part of Jocelyn’s plan for tonight…

Jocelyn continues, “I should have said it then and I didn’t. And I want to say it now.” Her eyes are alight with adoration that matches her soft smile. She is strangely calm, her mind surprisingly quiet, sure. More sure of this than of anything before in her life. Given how important what she’s about to say is. To both of them.

Maggie looks down. She remembers that moment, too. All too well. And the devastating hours, weeks, and months that followed it, as she came to terms with the fact that the woman she loved had disappeared back into London, and she had to let her go. Not that she ever did. As it turns out.

When Maggie raises her head again, Jocelyn says, quite simply, “It’s always been you.”

There’s a steely glint in Maggie’s eyes, and she queries, rather more harshly than she intends, “What has?” She can’t help it. Assumptions will not do now. And they’re both too old for games.

Jocelyn gives a small huff, that infatuated smile still playing on her lips. “You’re gonna make me say it aren’t you?” Dearest Maggie, ever the journalist, always more questions, searching for clarity. And Jocelyn knows, too, that Maggie’s upped the stakes, intentionally testing her resolve, pushing her to tell the truth. Once and for all.

“Fine...” She deserves it, coward that she’s been. Jocelyn pauses only a second before the words finally leave her, clear in their certainty: “I’m in love with you, Maggie. Ever since you came here.”

The dull ache in Maggie’s heart, the one she thought long buried, the one that’s been teasing and taunting in this last little while, catapults up from the depths of her lungs and forces a sharp exhalation. Out of relief, perhaps? Or skepticism? She’s on the verge of tears as she shakes her head, asking, “What am I supposed to do with that now?” After all these years, after so much time has passed, she adds to herself.

Jocelyn looks down with a slight shrug. Truth be told, she hadn’t thought about what would happen after she’d made her confession. She knows Maggie isn’t with Lil anymore. And she thinks Maggie’s been encouraging her. So she hopes. For something. But there was no plan.

She chastises herself for being so thoroughly selfish. Again. She’d been so focused on her own desire—need—to put things right that she honestly didn’t think about how Maggie would feel, being suddenly bombarded with this information, seemingly out of the blue.

She’s about to apologise, to explain, when Maggie cuts her off, exasperated, bemused, “Do you really think I didn’t know?”

Ah, Jocelyn! Still so very much lacking in self-awareness. How could Maggie not have known, the way Jocelyn looks at her? She’d long ago stopped holding her breath in anticipation that Jocelyn would finally come out with it during one of those long, smoldering gazes. She’d’ve suffocated to death by now if she hadn’t.

Jocelyn searches Maggie’s eyes, genuinely surprised: Maggie has known her heart. Despite the excellent job she’d thought she’d done of tucking it away for so long. “Well, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because you never did.” Maggie’s tone is accusatory, and there’s pain behind her words. Jocelyn doesn’t even know this one basic rule: You don’t out someone else. Ever. Under any circumstances. Especially if you think they don’t know themselves.

And Maggie had been at Greenham, for fuck’s sake. On the front lines of lesbian feminist activism long before she’d ever seen Jocelyn in all her glory at the Old Bailey. Out and damn proud, petal, four decades before it was trendy. She’d paid the price for her politics, for her activism. So she has no patience, then or now, for cowards or closets. Especially if you love someone.

“I thought,” she begins slowly, trying to hold it together, “if you really feel that strongly, you’d be brave, you wouldn’t care what people thought.” Battling back tears, she stops to swallow, to regain her composure. “But your work mattered more.” Than me, than us, she adds silently.

“I thought it did,” Jocelyn concedes. She had been unwilling then, just as her career was reaching its lofty zenith, to open herself up to censure. It was hard enough to be a woman in a man’s job. Best not add “lesbian” to the cocktail. Sometimes even now, let alone back then. And that had meant shutting her heart down—and Maggie out.

That was only part of it, of course. The logical part. Although, in retrospect, even that may not have been all that logical given that she’d already been in silk for six years before she met Maggie, blonde curls flying, trying to light her cigarette that windy July afternoon on the promenade. She’d already proven herself professionally, as it turns out. But she had become so used to striving, climbing, reaching for that next professional success. And she knew that, as a woman in a man’s job, she had to be unimpeachable. Perfect.

And she didn’t recognize herself when she was with Maggie, who caused her to feel things she’d never felt before and couldn’t even name back then. She was terrified, confused, so she had to run away.

“But I was wrong.”

Maggie is utterly (and uncommonly) without words, blinking almost uncomprehendingly. Did Jocelyn Knight just admit that she was _wrong_? What the hell is going on?

She is so tempted to tease, to affectionately chide, even to gloat a little. But this moment, she knows, is another in their story of which it’s far too important to make light. They are teetering together on a knife’s edge. It would take only a tiny misstep for one or both of them to get hurt here. Very, very badly. Perhaps irrevocably.

“Well, say something.” Jocelyn exhales in a shaky laugh, trying to disguise her creeping dread that all this planning—the carefully curated food, wine, and gorgeous sunset to accompany the final giving of her desperately willing heart—might simply be too little, too late.

Maggie shakes her head slowly, cautiously, trying to work out why now, why tonight. The memory of Jocelyn’s sharp words of only two days ago cuts her as deeply now as they had done then. “Jocelyn, you’re grieving, you’re feeling alone. That’s why you’re saying this.”

As much as Maggie loves Jocelyn, she’s not about to be tossed aside again. And right now, she’s thinking of how much they’ve both changed. How much Jocelyn doesn’t (or can’t, or won’t?) see Maggie’s love for her. All the times Jocelyn told her to go away, wouldn’t let her in. Literally and figuratively. She exhales, resigned, suddenly thoroughly wary—and weary—of trying to scale the wall of Jocelyn’s tall stone tower. “But it’s over. The moment passed.”

It hurts to say it, and the pulse deep in her abdomen, not to mention the shortness of her breath as Jocelyn’s eyes, wise and clear, search hers, makes her a bloody liar. But there it is. Armour, however cracked and worn it may well be in the sensitive places, remains her best chance of getting out of this conversation emotionally unscathed. And with their tenuously rehabilitated friendship intact.

For her part, Jocelyn hears the words, but she’s having none of it. They don’t match her experience of their time together in these last few weeks: shared dinners, a gift of precious poems, the laughter and easy conversation, the carbonara, sitting together on their bench at sunset. She’s still rediscovering her humanity, it’s true, but the part that’s alive again is so sure that Maggie has been urging, cajoling, encouraging her journey back to her beating heart. Back to where they were, together.

Determined to see this through, to somehow, some way, render an apology without words, she declares with surprising confidence (even to herself), “No, I don’t think it has,” and raises a slow, steady hand to Maggie’s cheek. Jocelyn’s heart races, but not from nerves or fear. No. From overwhelming need. To kiss Maggie again. To feel her lips under her own. To be close to her. To hold her again. To smell her scent. To love her. To know her heart. As least as well as Maggie seems to know hers, even after all this time. Or maybe, it occurs, in spite of it.

Under the Jocelyn’s fingertips, Maggie’s skin is soft, so alive, warmer than she’s ever imagined.

Maggie’s eyes are on Jocelyn’s, watching. A silent witness to this new boldness. She holds her breath as Jocelyn’s fingers slide back behind her ear. The touch is quiet, tender, steady. A choice deliberately, finally, made. Maggie starts as Jocelyn cradles her jaw with such tender resolve, those long fingers making a gentle tangle in her hair. The throbbing in her core turns urgent as she leans forward to meet Jocelyn’s lips.

Eyes slipping shut, their kiss is gentle but certain. Maggie’s hand rises, seemingly of its own accord, to hover between them, and Jocelyn can’t help but thrill at the involuntary somersault her heart performs in response to Maggie’s little push into her lips.

This is not the first sweet, tentative kiss of a new relationship. This is a kiss heavy with memories: of a sunset walk up on Briar Cliff, of fish and chips on the Broadchurch pier, of a lazy Sunday afternoon spent on Jocelyn’s boat, of lilies abandoned on the garden wall outside Maggie’s rented flat, of laughter, long letters, and even longer phone calls, of their bodies pressed together, warm and soft, as they swayed together around the furniture in Jocelyn’s living room, of their first and only Christmas together, of giddy exhilaration followed by immeasurable grief.

And then Maggie’s suspended hand moves to Jocelyn’s shoulder, pushing back against her gently, but purposefully, to break their contact.

All Maggie wants is to touch and explore every part of Jocelyn’s body. Now, and for the rest of their lives. To feel their limbs in a naked jumble together. To abandon thought, to be finally free! Of all the questions, the frustration, the worry, the regret, the ‘what ifs’. To irrevocably lose her heart in Jocelyn’s pale blue eyes. To make up for all the wasted years. To tell her she’s never stopped loving her.

Her desire is almost suffocating; she can’t catch her breath. And that Jocelyn’s gentle fingers have broadened their tantalizingly long reach to the nape of her neck isn’t helping.

But she can’t let go of the fear, either. They’ve been here before.

“Jocelyn, wait...” Maggie slowly shakes her head no, still pushing her hand against Jocelyn’s shoulder until Jocelyn’s hand drops away. “Stop…” She needs to think clearly. She leans back to get a better look, to assess the situation from a journalist’s safe distance.

But her eyes are blurry, wet. She is crying! What the actual fuck? A sob catches hard in her chest, and she has to look away. She’s thinking of the first—and last—time they kissed, on her front doorstep.

Jocelyn had insisted on walking her home. She didn’t protest; she was a bit tipsy. After all, they had polished off an entire bottle of champagne during the New Year’s Eve fireworks. But mostly she was greedy for any extra time spent with Jocelyn before she left again for London. They giggled together when Maggie’s knees went all wobbly, but she steadied herself against her front door frame as Jocelyn closed the distance between them. She smelled of summer sunshine, lavender, and warm salty air. How Jocelyn managed that on such a chilly night, Maggie couldn’t say, but Jocelyn’s warm lips on her cold cheek sidelined the question in any case.

Jocelyn’s nose drifted until it rested against Maggie’s. They stood like that, noses touching, breathing together in the crisp night air, for who knows how long. A second? A lifetime?

Maggie brought her hand to Jocelyn’s elbow, encouraging her, coaxing her. Bursting with joy and fizzy with desire, she was just about to tease, to urge, to reassure, “It’s okay, I won’t bite,” when Jocelyn finally leaned in to brush Maggie’s lips. Once, twice. Maggie tightened her grip to hold Jocelyn firmly in place. Then a third time, more deliberately, and Maggie tasted tea and champagne and fine tobacco.

She didn’t invite her in (she’s often wondered what would’ve happened if she had), and Jocelyn didn’t ask, but their sweet goodbye was charged with a promise.

And after she watched Jocelyn walk into the night, Maggie closed the front door to her new house and danced a silly, celebratory jig down her hallway and into her tiny kitchen. She felt like a teenager again, giddy with infatuation. But it was more than that: She had found her life in Broadchurch. She was in absolute, hopeless, and as it turned out, hapless, love with Jocelyn Knight.

Because just a few short hours later, as the new millennium dawned a brilliant blue over Dorset, it all came crashing down. Jocelyn was too afraid. And (Maggie assumed) her professional reputation mattered more to her than that unspoken promise she had made, shared only in breaths and soft kisses.

“I can’t do this...” She can’t catch her breath for the sobs that are stuck in her throat. “We need to… Before…” Roughly, impatiently, futilely, Maggie swipes at the tears still streaming down her cheeks. She looks back up into those blue eyes, now a panicky jumble of confusion and fear, trying to decide how to begin the conversation that needs to happen before they can go any further.

She turns to the sea for answers and hears Lil’s advice ring in her head: Be clear, honest.

Her heart is so full of Jocelyn, and there is simply nothing to be done about it. There never was, as it turns out. Goodness knows she’s tried. Life has gone on. Work. Lovers, vacations, home renos. Her sisters and their children, most still up in and around Halifax. Partners, weddings, funerals, protests, rallies, friends. Then Lil. Smart, beautiful, patient Lil. And the Echo. Always the work she loves. But Danny’s death threw them so unexpectedly back together again.

And as Jocelyn watches, in painfully slow motion, the unreadable thoughts and countless emotions flit across Maggie’s beautiful profile, golden in the pink and yellow sunset, she is working hard not to descend into utter panic, into that too-familiar vortex of self-loathing. But she can feel herself failing quite miserably. And Maggie seems to be moving farther and farther away from her. Even though she’s still sitting right here, within reach.

Jocelyn’s heart is pounding, her breath is shallow, her own eyes are wet now, and she can literally feel the clench in her stomach. Like a vice grip on her organs. As if someone has just punched her. Hard. And left her for dead.

How is it possible that she’s fucked up this moment, too? After so much planning? She’s so bloody selfish, so utterly unlovable. How could she think herself worthy of Maggie Radcliffe? Thousands of pounds in debt and getting blinder by the day. On top of which...

“I was so stupid, Maggie,” she blurts out, hoping against hope that she can salvage this whole situation. “A bloody coward. And—it’s too late, I know, and not nearly enough—but I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Maggie needs to know. Somehow it matters in a way she’s never before realized.

“For everything.”

Not sure it’s the right thing to do, Jocelyn silently takes Maggie’s restless hands, still swiping the torrent of tears from her cheeks, into her own and rests them, piled all together, on Maggie’s knee. And since she doesn’t pull away, Jocelyn meets her eyes and finally, slowly, confesses one sin at a time: “For lying. For running away. For disappearing. For being afraid.”

Maggie takes in a sharp, audible breath and twines her fingers into Jocelyn’s, together there on her lap. She didn’t know she’d been waiting for an apology until she heard the words.

“What were you afraid of?” she queries softly.

Jocelyn exhales, ridding herself of fifteen years’ worth of regret, “Of you. Of me. Of me when I was with you. Of what loving you might mean for my career.”

Maggie’s heart is pounding in her ears, and the tears just keep on coming. It actually hurts, physically hurts, to love someone this much.

“What do you want, Jocelyn?” she implores. “Why did you plan all this, tell me this? Tonight?”

“I don’t know.” Jocelyn looks down at the corner of the picnic blanket, fraying just at the edge. It’s an honest answer; she really hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“Yes, you do,” Maggie insists, squeezing Jocelyn’s hands for extra emphasis, “I’m not playing games. Not anymore.”

“I’ve already told you, Maggie: I’m in love with you.”

“I heard you. But that’s not an answer to my question.”

“I want…” She wants everything! She wants to touch and love and feel and dance and talk and eat and drink and walk on the cliffs and go on holidays and read together and just live. With Maggie. Always. “I want you. I want us.”

“Oh, but Jocelyn,” Maggie sobs out of sheer frustration, “how can I _trust_ you? To know your own heart?” She detangles her fingers from Jocelyn’s and shifts her hips and legs to sit cross-legged, facing out to sea, trying to find answers, some kind of understanding, in the bobbing of a little sail boat making its way back into harbour.

“There have been times in these past few weeks when I’ve felt so certain that we could begin again. But other times,” she shakes her head, choking back more tears, “I’m just as certain we can’t. That it won’t work.”

“Why?” Jocelyn asks, her mind racing even faster than her heart, trying to absorb all this information at once, trying to wrap her stunned mind around the fact that she’d been right after all: The moment, their moment, hasn’t passed! Maggie, too, has been thinking about the possibility of them. Together. Again.

“Because you don’t see me! You’re so mercurial. Inconstant. And it always feels as if I’m doing all the work.” She turns back to meet Jocelyn’s eyes. “You say you love me, and,” Maggie declares simply, without fanfare, because it’s old news (to her at least) and actually beside the point right now, “I love you, too, but—”

At this, Jocelyn shifts excitedly, a flicker of hope leaping back into her face with what she knows is an irrepressibly mawkish grin.

Maggie Radcliffe just said she loves her!

Her insides are a delirious bundle of joy that she hasn’t felt in she doesn’t even know how many years. Decades. She feels like a little girl again, running with wild abandon through Linton Woods!

She leans in, starts to ask Maggie to repeat herself, because the words went by so quickly that she thinks she might have misheard, but Maggie cuts her off.

“Let me finish.”

She does. She owes Maggie at least that much, owes her her patience. Her attention.

“Are you ready for me to love you? Are you willing to let me love you? Being in love with me and being willing—and ready—to love me are two very different things.”

“Maggie, I’m sorry. I don’t…” Jocelyn shakes her head, irritated with herself, at her own continued inability to live in the world, to just be a normal person. Surely, anyone else would already know what Maggie’s trying to say. “I don’t understand what—”

“I’m asking you to let me in, Jocelyn! Behind that stone wall you’ve erected around your heart. Sometimes you do, but I have to work so bloody hard to get there. It’s fucking exhausting.” Maggie rolls her eyes to emphasize her point. “You say you need me, but you’re forever pushing me away. You’ve somehow managed to convince yourself that you’re alone in the world. But you’re not. I’m right here! I’ve been right here. All this time.”

“I know, Maggie. I know you have. And I can’t believe it. Sometimes I forget. And then when I do remember, I can’t imagine why.”

“I know you can’t. You never could. And I don’t understand that, either. Never have done.” She shakes her head, knowing this is something important that they’re going to have to come back to. “But I don’t want to be in one of your tidy little compartments. In a box labeled, ‘Maggie,’ to be opened only based on your needs, your convenience.

“And, honestly,” Maggie pauses, knowing Jocelyn will be hurt by her next point, but pushing forward anyway, because the only way to do this is truthfully, and that means laying all the cards out on the table, “that’s kind of what tonight feels like. All the care work with your mum is behind you, your work on the trial is essentially over, and now you have room for me. It’s like you’re ticking boxes, waiting for perfect timing. But that’s not how relationships work.”

Jocelyn hadn’t realized that’s how Maggie would interpret her choice of tonight to put things right. She’s not entirely wrong, it’s true. Waiting until after closing arguments seemed the best thing, if only because she and Ben wouldn’t need to work so late this evening, and she’d actually have time to plan, to run to the grocery store. To arrange things. It’s all about waiting now. For the jury to come back. But she didn’t envision that Maggie would assume this was her way of compartmentalizing. Again.

She’s about to protest, to correct her, to explain, but Maggie’s not finished. And she owes her this. She didn’t get a chance to have her say fifteen years ago, Jocelyn remembers with renewed humiliation at her appalling behaviour. Jocelyn didn’t even read the letter Maggie had sent her until last week, for goodness sake! The things she did because she was afraid. Terrified. Of love. Of life. Of Maggie.

“I want us, too, Jocelyn. But I need you to let me in. To make me part of your life. Not some parenthesis, some tangent. You’re like stone, Jocelyn. And I’m so tired of chipping away only to find you’ve refortified the wall overnight. Sometimes within seconds.” She suddenly remembers Lil’s apt description and adds, “It’s like having whiplash.”

This time it is Jocelyn’s turn to seek comfort in the rolling grey-blue waves below them. She absentmindedly plucks at the fabric of her roll neck, as if it will help her think better. Sharon had said essentially the same thing to her the other day. And it’s not that she didn’t believe her, take her seriously. But in that moment, with Ben there, she had neither the time nor energy to nurse those fresh wounds. Made on top of old scar tissue. Sharon thought she was being clever, original. As if Jocelyn didn’t already know it, hadn’t already been beating herself up over it for years.

“Sharon Bishop said that I’m ‘barely bloody human.’”

“When?!”

“One morning, early last week. We had quite the row before court, in front of Ben and Abby. And then we both got a good bollocking from the judge, who overheard us going at each other. First time in my career.”

“She doesn’t know you at all,” Maggie pronounces, silently hoping for an opportunity to give that Bishop woman a good bollocking on Jocelyn’s behalf.

“Well, she knows me better than you realize,” Jocelyn hints, “and I’m surprised you haven’t weedled it out of one or the other of us by now, doing those profiles for the paper. But that’s a conversation for another day.”

Maggie narrows her eyes and clenches her jaw; her curiosity—not to mention her determination not to be outdone by one Jocelyn Knight, who clearly knows something she doesn’t—is piqued. It takes barely a second for her quick mind to start putting the pieces together: “She had something to do with why you finally decided to take the brief, didn’t she?”

Jocelyn grins smugly but says nothing more, and Maggie resists the urge to press it. For now.

Jocelyn sighs and then glances at Maggie meaningfully. “Being ‘like stone’ is just about the same as being ‘barely human,’ wouldn’t you say?”

With a small frown that’s all compassion and part apology, Maggie silently concedes the similarities. But then she counters, clarifying, “The difference, though, is that I love you.” Maggie impulsively touches her palm to Jocelyn’s chest, above her breast, over her heart. “She’s still in here. Somewhere. The woman I fell in love with all those years ago.”

Jocelyn puts her hand over Maggie’s, and she can feel her own heartbeat under her fingers as she caresses the soft skin on the back of Maggie’s hand.

Maggie continues, “She emerges in such surprising and unexpected ways: She trusts me to sit for an interview that I know she’d do with no other journalist. She reads lesbian poetry, for goodness sake! She invites me for tea. And,” Maggie jokes, “she slays dragon photocopiers for me.”

Jocelyn splutters, proudly acknowledging her victory over that silly contraption earlier this morning. “Ben showed me how,” she concedes, “but I did make the copy myself.”

“My hero!”

Maggie pretends to swoon, and they laugh, but Jocelyn’s hand shivers under her own. Noting the sinking sun, and the fact that their little picnic spot is now wholly engulfed in shadows (and much cooler for it), Maggie gets up, pulling Jocelyn with her. “You’re cold. Let’s get this stuff packed up and head back.”

Together, they make quick work of readying the little portable grill for travel and repacking Veronica’s old wicker picnic basket. It’s the same one, Maggie notes, that held the wine, sandwiches, and delicious lemon cake that Sunday on the boat. Maggie swings into her jacket, throws her bag over her shoulder, and hoists the grill onto her hip. Jocelyn hands her their blanket and then leads the way back up to the house, basket on her arm.

Although they climb the short distance up the cliff, past their bench, and across the footpath to Jocelyn’s back gate in wordless silence, their conversation is far from over, and they both know it.

“Go ahead and leave the grill there, please,” Jocelyn says, pointing to a spot just under the balcony, to the side of the steps.

She does, stashing their picnic blanket beside the grill at the same time, tucking it under the steps in case of rain, to be shaken out and laundered properly later.

By the time she makes her way in through the French door, Jocelyn’s already disappeared into the kitchen to, judging by the familiar sounds of the fridge door being opened and closed and the dishwasher being loaded, sort out their picnic items.

With a plan to help, Maggie heads through to the dining room and past Jocelyn’s desk on the way to the kitchen when she notices a brilliant flash of blue and green tossed over the back of Jocelyn’s desk chair.

The colours are unusual in that they are decidedly not Jocelyn’s; she tends towards browns and beiges, cranberries and mauves, with black and grey or white for court. That’s why Maggie noticed it; the colours popped so against the sombre brown furniture and stacks of manila file folders. In addition to which, it’s May, and (she smirks affectionately) only Jocelyn would wear a wool scarf in May.

But then she stops, startled into dim recognition. Is that…?

She tentatively fingers the loose, chunky knit, remembering that grey Friday afternoon in late October, waiting for Jocelyn in the cold drizzle in Fountain Court. Jocelyn had arrived a few minutes late, frustrated, breathless, and without outerwear of any sort. She had just had a brief forced on her by her clerk and now had to work late. Assuring her that their weekend was far from ruined, Maggie promised to have dinner waiting back at the flat. Jocelyn gave her the key, and she lent Jocelyn this scarf. To keep her just a little warmer on the walk back to her chambers. And maybe, Maggie admits in retrospect, to remind her of who, and what, would be waiting for her when she arrived home later that evening.

Slowly lifting the scarf off the back of Jocelyn’s chair, she runs the length of wool through her hands in disbelief. “You kept this,” she asks, “all this time?” looking up in astonishment at Jocelyn, who’s just come back in with a steaming mug in each hand.

Jocelyn is beyond embarrassed. She forgot she’d left Maggie’s scarf there. She’s been wearing it around the house these last few days since unearthing it from the antique chest in her bedroom as a way of keeping Maggie close to her. As a way of reminding herself of what might be possible if she finally put things right. And it seems silly now that Maggie’s found her out.

She shrugs self-consciously and proffers one of the mugs to Maggie. In an attempt to change the subject. To divert her attention. To continue their ongoing negotiation.

But that Jocelyn not only still has this scarf, and has also obviously been wearing it, changes everything about how Maggie thought this evening would go. It is all the proof she needs that the woman with whom she fell in love all those years ago really is in there somewhere. Trying desperately to find her way back to her humanity. Back to Maggie. And Maggie has never wanted her more than she does right now.

In an instant, she knows what she must do. What needs to happen next.

Replacing the scarf gently across the back of Jocelyn’s desk chair, just where she found it, Maggie takes the mug that Jocelyn’s offered her. But she takes Jocelyn’s, too, and puts both mugs down on the edge of the dining room table.

“I don’t want any tea,” she says decisively, slate grey locked onto pale blue. She takes both Jocelyn’s hands in her own and uses her body to gently but emphatically push her back against the kitchen doorframe. She is determined that tonight, finally and once and for all, there will be no confusion about her intentions, her feelings. If Jocelyn is willing to see her, willing to let her in.

Holding her there against the aged wood, Maggie closes the distance between them, and Jocelyn breathes slowly, surrendering to the exquisite feel of Maggie’s body so close to her own. She smells the same as she always has: a hint of citrus mixed with coffee. But gone now is the tobacco; instead, there’s a delicious trace of printer ink, like the pages of Jocelyn’s own ancient legal texts. She smiles; Maggie is still familiar, comforting. Irresistible.

And there’s that sensation again. The one she ran from all those years ago. That feeling of being completely at home and utterly adrift all at the same time. That warm tingle, as if her body is no longer of this earth. And the hot wetness that rushes through her core. She wants Maggie! Terribly. Urgently. She never wants to let her go from this time, from this place.

And Maggie can feel her own heat rise as she lets her nose rest against Jocelyn’s, intentionally drawing out this moment so that Jocelyn _feels_ what the rest of their lives could be like. They stand like that, noses touching, breathing together expectantly until Jocelyn impatiently pulls her hands from Maggie’s tight grasp to bring them up to her hips, fingers coaxing, kneading, imploring.

Exhilarated by Jocelyn’s fervor, Maggie smiles before finally leaning in to brush her lips. Once, twice, as Jocelyn tightens her grip and pulls Maggie to her, breasts and bellies pressed together now underneath jackets and sweaters. Then a third time, even more deliberately, more intensely. And then their arms are around each other in a tight embrace, loving, supporting, promising. As if this is something they do every day. It just feels that right.

Committed to her plan, though, Maggie releases Jocelyn, taking a step back to separate them. “I’m going home now. I need to think. I want _you_ to think. And if tomorrow you still feel the same way, knowing what I need from you, then we’ll see.”

She leans in for one last kiss, cementing the feel of Jocelyn’s lips on her own. If she has to leave her tonight—and she does, for both their sakes—she’s going to do it right, reminding her of where they were, what they could have again, and what’s at stake now.

She takes Jocelyn’s hands again, whispering, “I love you, Jocelyn. I’ve never stopped loving you. But I need you to understand what that means. I need you to be sure you know what you want.”

With that, Maggie’s off, through the sitting room, out the French door, through the garden gate, and back down the footpath.

And Jocelyn is left alone, quivering with longing and thoroughly wobbly against her own kitchen doorframe.


End file.
